I’m on the $2 for three months of Tidal Masters promotion. So far, I like some elements of the service (adding artists, albums and playlists to my library is straightforward and convenient), some of the MQA albums I’ve listened to are quite good sounding (if not as bit-perfect as 24/96 and 24/192 FLAC files), and the iPhone app isn’t bad.Tidal is just a trash buggy app. I've had issues for it for years and support never actually bothers to help. They tell you they're looking into it then completely ghost you no matter how much you try to reach out to them. My entire account is bugged and filled with duplicates and it's been years since they told me they were looking into and trying to fix it lol. They never responded to me again. Terrible company. And for some reason tidal always sounded artificially sharper and boosted a few db to me. Didn't sound right. Even YouTube sounded better to me. For the longest time I thought that meant I just didn't like hifi lossless audio and that it may have even just been a placebo that my mundane brain couldn't tell the difference of to begin with. Lo and behold, I find someone's thorough examination of their content only to reveal that it IS boosted by a few db compared to Redbook, AND that it doesn't even match master source because most mqa tracks on tidal are not only lossy but seem to be just upsampled from CD quality rather than using the actual source. I forget which artist there was, but they took their work off after they found out tidal posted "master" quality audio of their work when they never even submitted their master quality source yet. Even though I will finally have an mqa capable dac I will not bother using mqa. Shady business practices like these need to be stopped. They basically just made up a proprietary audio format to milk ppl of money with licensing fees and the such. MQA COULD have been decent if it was actually used properly for it's intended purpose, as a lossy format that contains source quality audio in a CD quality data size, which would have been a good in between for streaming that could fit in between CD quality flac and master quality flac (since master quality flac will still always be better), but instead, at least in most on tidal, it's ended up being worse than both. I want to be mad at companies for even adopting mqa into their chips cause it's all a hoax, but it's not their fault, they need to make things that consumers want, and us dumb consumers not knowing any better have wanted mqa dacs enough to push manufacturers into to put mqa into their stuff and further supporting this madness. Well at the end of the day I'm fine with mqa gaining traction but only if there's going to be more transparency about what it's actually good for, and if tidal dies out completely cause it's a shit service. Anyways, my rant aside, here's a good read in mqa:
Testing MQA: Is it worse than FLAC?
TLDR: MQA isn't lossless, is arguably worse than normal flac, and is seemingly nothing more than a (quite effective) scheme to generate licensing fees. With the frustrating addition that if you are a Tidal user, even if you have no MQA dac, and use the "Hifi" streaming quality setting, MQA encode...audiophilestyle.com
Even if this doesn't help you fix your issues at least you won't feel like you're missing out on anything and can just move on to a better platform, which would be a better solution to your issue anyways.
But the 2-3 second dropout at the beginning of songs is inexcusable. The lossy/distortion that the MQA encoder adds to masters is inexcusable. The fact that the Tidal app itself doesn’t tell you what the actual resolution is of the file you’re playing (except when you see it on the D30’s screen) is deceptive. The claims made by their marketing are deceptive. So once my 3 months are up, I’ll be moving on.
So far, the best service I’ve tried is Apple Music. Ties into my existing iTunes library, gives me hifi resolution (even shows me exactly what the resolution is in a pop-up window), works on all my Apple devices, and no sound dropouts. The D30 handles Apple Music superbly!
But I’m primarily a YouTube Music guy. I know, I know. The 256kb MP3s are wretched, but I don’t want to pay for Apple Music on top of my YouTube Music subscription. Good thing I’ve got plenty of 24/96 and 24/192 FLAC files to feed the D30.
